War Hits Close to Home for Arab-Americans in Detroit-Area Schools

Southfield, Mich--For students in Laura Schiller's 6th-grade class
at Birney Middle School here, the war in the Persian Gulf strikes at
the heart of who they are and where their families come from.

In addition to a handful of Jews, who have a special concern about
the war's impact on Israel, and several students with a family member
in the U.S. armed forces in the Gulf region, the class includes several
Chaldeans--Iraqi Catholics whose ancestral home is Tel Kaif, a village
in northern Iraq.

Add to that mix the fact that some of the Chaldean students in the
class in this upper-middle-class Detroit suburb in Oakland County have
cousins serving in the Iraqi military.

During one discussion last week, students in Ms. Schiller's class
raised questions about everything from the cost of the United States'
Patriot missiles to the origin of Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

"We want kids to know there does not need to be a war here in the
classroom," the teacher said. "You can be friends and agree to
disagree."

Despite the tension of the Middle East conflict, harmony has been
maintained at the racially and ethnically diverse middle school.

"We work very hard on the issue of human relations," said the
school's principal, Todd Henderson.

Not far away, however, many of the estimated 60,000 to 75,000
Chaldeans in the Detroit area fear the possibility of being swept up in
a potential backlash against Arab-Americans as a result of the Persian
Gulf war.

"Last weekend, my husband received two bomb threats at our
business," said Josephine Sarafa, a Chaldean who is a
bilingual-education and English-as-a-second-language coordinator in the
nearby Birmingham public schools.

She and her husband own a grocery store in Detroit's inner city, as
do hundreds of other Chaldeans.

"We are seeking police protection ourselves out of fear of a
backlash," she said.

Events in the Middle East have put residents in the Detroit area on
edge in recent weeks. Like residents in other large U.S. cities, many
here express a general fear of terrorism, underscored by Mayor Coleman
Young's recent request that the National Guard be activated to
supplement the city police department's security efforts.

(Gov. John Engler of Michigan last week declined the request, saying
that he had received no hint of any terrorist activity aimed at
Detroit.)

But to the approximately 250,000 Arab-Americans in the Detroit area,
the fears are much more acute. Many worried last week that they will be
subject to anti-Arab harassment.

"There is already a growth in small incidents, such as school car
pools getting rid of their Arab kids," said Ismael Ahmed, executive
director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services
in nearby Dearborn.

There have also been numerous bomb threats, including several at
area high schools.

In a more serious incident last week, a Dairy Queen owned by a
Palestinian-American in rural Blissfield, Mich., was burned. In a
newspaper report the previous day about earlier minor vandalism at the
store, the owner had reiterated his view that the United States should
not have entered a war with Iraq.

Incidents designed to harass or discriminate against Arab-American
are by no means confined to the Detroit area.

"In the last three weeks, we have had a dramatic rise in
incidents,'' said Scott Easton, a spokesman for the national office of
the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington.

From Aug. 2, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, through the end of last
month, 42 instances of bomb threats, physical assault, hate calls, or
hate mail were directed at Arab-Americans, according to the committee.
This month alone, two dozen incidents have already been reported, Mr.
Easton said.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation's decision to talk to
Arab-American community leaders and others about, among other things,
whether they know any terrorists in the United States has exacerbated
the tensions, he said.

The agency has said it is acting primarily to protect Arab-Americans
from hate crimes, he added, but, "by making a suspect class out of us,
they are raising the anxiety level and potentially increasing the
threats against us."

According to a recent demographic profile prepared by the Arab
American Institute in Washington, an estimated 2 million to 2.5 million
Arab-Americans live in the United States. Most are concentrated in and
around such big cities as Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Los Angeles,
as well as in the New York City borough of Brooklyn and several suburbs
in northern New Jersey.

Many Arab-Americans have expressed hope that the schools can
maintain a sanctuary for their sons and daughters while also promoting
an understanding of the issues that will help prevent acts of violence
or discrimination.

Educators in districts enrolling Arab-American students, meanwhile,
worry that that may be an impossible task.

In Paterson, N.J., tensions between the large Arab-American
community and the population at large have been high, said Margaret
Mary Dalton, principal of the Charles J. Riley School. Scuffles and
verbal abuse have broken out since events in the Persian Gulf began to
unfold last August.

But, she said, school officials have been vigilant in trying to make
sure that students check their hostilities at the gates of the K-8
school, where about 50 percent of the students are Arab-American.

"We're trying to operate as business as usual," she said. "We
decided, as soon as anything moves into name-calling, it would have to
be stopped."

In Aurora, Colo., a suburb of Denver, Arab-American students have
turned to an Islamic support group run by the Colorado Muslim Society
and Islamic Center to vent their fears and frustrations. Students say
they have endured a stream of sarcastic and stereotypical comments
about their religion, heritage, and homelands.

At Lakewood (Ohio) High School, a Palestinian-American student
wearing a "Free Palestine" T-shirt was taunted and accused of
supporting President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.

In Los Angeles, rumors and abuse toward Arab-American students were
enough to prompt the school board last November to approve a measure
reiterating support for a81988 anti-slur/no-name-calling
resolution.

The new resolution directed "staff to remind all schools that they
are expected to have in place a schoolwide code which clearly and
emphatically states that acts of harassment or violence or threats
motivated by hate or bigotry will not be tolerated."

In Dearborn, a community of 86,000 where approximately one in five
residents is of Arabic descent, the concern over students' safety and
well-being reached its peak after war broke out on Jan. 16.

The city, which is home to Ford Motor Company's headquarters, has
few Iraqi-Americans. But it has attracted Arabs since early this
century, when jobs at Ford's massive Rouge plant lured Lebanese
immigrants.

Now, most Arabs in the city are either Lebanese, Palestinian, or
Yemeni, and each new outbreak of Middle East strife brings more Arab
immigrants to the city's south end.

Many children of these new arrivals attend Salina Elementary School,
where 96 percent of the enrollment is of Arabic descent.

"This area has been the first stop for many immigrants," the
principal, Gary Wolter, said. "This school has always been identified
as a community center. I think the parents feel very comfortable with
us taking care of their children."

The school has tightened security since the war broke out, he said,
but it has not experienced any disruption.

The same cannot be said for Fordson High School, also in Dearborn,
where slightly more than 50 percent of the students are of Arab
descent.

In the weeks leading up to the Jan. 15 deadline for Iraqi withdrawal
from Kuwait, reporters from Detroit newspapers and television stations,
as well as correspondents from national publications, were constant
visitors.

Expectations ran high that the heavily Arab school would somehow
explode with tension, officials at the school said, adding that
district officials finally decided to ban the news media from the
premises.

"Otherwise," said the principal, Barbara O'Brien, "we would have
turned into a circus."

Also, she said, an in-service training day for teachers scheduled
for Jan. 15 was postponed so that students, who would have been off
that day, could be kept in school. Officials feared that an antiwar
protest planned by a local college for that day could spell trouble for
the high-school students if they were free to attend.

When war broke out, Ms. O'Brien said, parents were called in to help
monitor the halls and to keep out visitors.

There have been bomb threats, but at least one was traced to a
Fordson student.

"It's not really tense in the school, but everyone around us expects
something to happen," said Susan Shamseddine, an English teacher who is
Lebanese-American.

Students have said that Arab and Anglo students tend to get along
well as long as they are at the school, but that the Arab students face
discrimiel10lnatory comments when they attend athletic contests at
other high schools. At some games, they say, students from opposing
schools have mockingly worn Arab headdresses.

This month, the athletic league that includes Fordson considered a
proposal to cancel the rest of the league's remaining games for the
school year. The proposal was perceived at Fordson as an expression of
fear of disturbances during contests with the heavily Arab-American
school.

The league voted to proceed with games, but security was increased.
No incidents had been reported by late last week.

Unlike Dearborn, where some neighborhoods are still densely
populated with Arab-Americans and buffeted by new immigration, the
Detroit area's Chaldean community has been steadily migrating from its
original base in the city to the northern suburbs.

Also, because exit visas were restricted by the Iraqi government
after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in 1981, no new major
immigration of Chaldeans has occurred since then.

Chaldeans first came to the area around 1910, but the majority
emigrated here in the 1960's, local church members said. Factory jobs
and the presence of other Middle Eastern immigrants drew them to the
area, said Mrs. Sarafa of the Birmingham schools.

Many opened small groceries and liquor stores, known as "party
stores," in urban Detroit neighborhoods, using family members as a
ready source of low-cost workers.

The Sarafas have used their income to put their six children through
college and several through graduate school.

"We don't want them to just have limited choices in the family
business," Ms. Sarafa said.

On a gritty strip of Seven Mile Road in northern Detroit, Chaldean
party stores are interspersed with auto-body repair shops. At the
modest brick-and-wood Chaldean Sacred Heart Church there, dozens of
elderly Chaldean men and women filed in one day last week to continue a
special three days of prayers for peace called for by the local bishop.
(The Chaldean church is an Eastern Rite church that has been in union
with Rome since 1830.)

Although the Chaldeans' ancestral roots are in Iraq, there is little
support for Saddam Hussein. As Catholics, they are a religious minority
in a mostly Moslem country.

"We have no quarrel with anyone," Ms. Sarafa said. "The Chaldeans
moved here because they did not want to live in dictatorship. They are
now dismayed and torn."

"Of course, their higher priority is to the United States, their
land of choice," she added. "But some families have a son in the U.S.
armed forces, and a son or uncle or nephew in the armed forces of
Iraq."

Andy Mansor, a 6th grader at Birney Middle School, where Chaldean
students make up less than 15 percent of the student enrollment, has
two uncles serving in the Iraqi Army, poised to fight against the
allied forces led by the United States.

"I'm worried for them," he said.

Frank Hermiz, an 11-year-old classmate, said he worries for his
grandparents, who are still in Tel Kaif.

"Before the [Jan. 15] deadline," he said, "there was a special place
at our church where we prayed for peace."

The community is drawing together as the war proceeds, said Amir
Denha, editor of the weekly Detroit Chaldean Times. He is using his
short-wave radio to get in touch with relatives in Iraq, "to read
between the lines on information."

"We have to deal with this crisis smarter than everyone," he added.
"We thought when we left Iraq, we wouldn't have to deal with this kind
of political problem again."

Information for this story was also gathered by Jonathan
Weisman.

Vol. 10, Issue 19, Page 1, 14

Published in Print: January 30, 1991, as War Hits Close to Home for Arab-Americans in Detroit-Area Schools

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